By Angus Thompson

14 June 2018 — 6:52pm

A NSW coroner has delivered a stinging takedown of the state's under-resourced child protection sector and urged Family and Community Services Minister Pru Goward to fix the problem in the findings of an inquest into the deaths of two infant sisters.

The baby girls, whose identities have been suppressed, both died within months of their births to an ice-addled mother, whose chaotic living circumstances and criminal associations were repeatedly ignored by the Department of Family and Community Services (FaCS).

“The problem is clear and urgent. We are currently failing children who need our help," Deputy State Coroner Harriet Grahame said in her scathing findings, which were handed down last Friday.

The mother and grandmother of BLGN and DG outside the Glebe Coroner's Court.

Photo: Peter Rae

FaCS received several reports raising serious concerns for the safety of the children in the mother's care between 2010 and 2014 but the department failed to act upon them, often closing the reports due to "competing priorities".

According to the reports made to FaCS during that period, the young mother - who also had two sons - regularly consumed ice in front of her children and in the company of her own drug-addicted mother, who also neglected the children.

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There was a 2010 report of one of the boys crawling around in garbage of the floor; of the mother dealing drugs in the presence of her oldest son; of the mother arguing with two men and a gun shot being fired; and of the children playing unsupervised, the house being unhygienic and having no food.

Some of the reports were "screened out" because they were similar to others.

Despite many of them reaching the risk of significant harm (ROSH) threshold, they were not allocated to caseworkers and subsequently closed because of lack of resources.

The eldest girl, known in the findings as BLGN, was three months old when she died in the family's Sydney home on April 10, 2014.

An autopsy was unable to determine her cause of death but was unable to exclude suffocation from one of the items in her overcrowded cot.

The mother, grandmother and others in the house had been on an ice binge in the days beforehand.

A Mission Australia caseworker, who made multiple attempts to have FaCS intervene, told the department "she did not want blood on her hands" after being informed a report on the family would be closed the day before the child died.

Ms Grahame said it was likely the children would have been removed if the reports were acted upon.

An initial review completed six days after the child's death determined there were no significant issues with FaCS's response to the family.

The second child was 19 days old when she died on June 30, 2016. She was with a carer, having been removed from the mother soon after birth.

The autopsy categorised the cause of death as Sudden Unexplained Death in Infancy (SUDI).

Ms Grahame said FaCS's responsibility over children couldn't be shifted "by creating a culture where overworked staff can close reports, claiming a lack of resources for competing priorities".

"Failures of the kind made in relation to the ... family should not be swept under the carpet. The Minister and the Secretary must be made to grapple openly with these issues at the highest level and to find solutions to the resourcing issues identified," she said.

Ms Grahame made a number of recommendations, including that it not close ROSH reports for "competing priorities".

“If this inquest can permanently banish the words 'competing priorities' from the FaCS lexicon then some small thing will have been achieved," she said.

A spokesperson for Ms Goward said that the government would consider Ms Grahame's findings.

"FACS and its NGO partners need to continuously review their practices to ensure that high standards of care for our most vulnerable children are always met," she said.

She said the government would invest in additional caseworkers and support staff to shape a better child protection system.